Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday October 08, 2015 @05:15PM
from the out-of-the-shadows dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A Russian man that calls himself "Alister Maclin" has been disrupting the Bitcoin network for over a week, creating duplicate transactions, and annoying users. According to Bitcoin experts, the attack was not dangerous and is the equivalent of "spam" on the Bitcoin blockchain servers, known in the industry as a "malleability attack," creating duplicate transactions, but not affecting Bitcoin funds. Maclin recently gave an interview to Vice.

I guess you were not there when it got way more drastic drop in price.
In 2011 we got a 90% drop in price...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]
That said, the experimental currency still worth more than 200 times the USD; itself a pretty string currency compared to the hundreds other currency on the planet.

I dont agree. It was in the mid 200's (235-240) before the hype and big jump in price. It reached a high dollar amount, which is way above the valuation that bitcoin could sustain. After which it has corrected back down to the mid 200's and has held there for the last year.

I would say that the long term trend is flat with a slow rise, I also expect to see another large spike when and if the hype picks back up.

I sure hope for another spike, I still own a few BC. But yes, it's not an alarming trend, no race to the bottom, I didn't mean to say that it goes to zero. But from what I see in the yearly stats I check now and then, it seems slightly downward.

This is a list of notable cryptocurrencies. There were more than 669 cryptocurrencies available for trade in online markets as of 24 August 2015 and more than 740 in total[1] but only 8 of them had market capitalizations over $10 million.

Most fiat currency live about 100 years. Giving the fact that Bitcoin is a totally new concept (no central authority) I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.

I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.

even if BTC as a currency never gets any useful due to exchange rate instabilities,bitcoin the protocole is already extremely useful.(absence of a central authority being instead distributed across the whole network, and thus freedom to chose any provider for both ends (customer and merchant) of a transaction - both don't need to have accounts at PayPal, or at the Visa / MasterCard duopoly, etc.)

I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.

even if BTC as a currency never gets any useful due to exchange rate instabilities,
bitcoin the protocole is already extremely useful.
(absence of a central authority being instead distributed across the whole network, and thus freedom to chose any provider for both ends (customer and merchant) of a transaction - both don't need to have accounts at PayPal, or at the Visa / MasterCard duopoly, etc.)

Exactly. Currency, to be viable, must be a reliable store of value. Large swings in value negate that, even as it makes it a useful speculative investment. The protocol is useful for what it provides, but that can be replicated by any number of currencies should someone want to so do. As long as there is a way to immediately convert BitCoin to real money you'll be able to buy things with it; if only because all it is acting as is an intermediary to facilitate the transaction and thus unlikely to see any si

It is important that transactions not go through any kind of centralized system, but this sort of attack shows that you can't simply make the entire network a virtual centralized system. We need a replacement system that eliminates the need for a single physical or virtual store.

You realize this sort of attack was entirely expected, and that the system is engineered to withstand it, and did, trivially?

Expected, yes. Engineered to withstand - no. Bitcoin Core nodes accept as many transactions as they can with no memory limit until eventually they bloat up so much the operating system kills them. The official "solution" for this is to babysit your node and if you see it running out of memory, change a command line flag to make it ignore any transactions with lower than the given fee

No, because he didn't disrupt the network. He just spammed the blockchain a bit. No transactions were forged, interrupted, or otherwise fucked with. Just a few extra megs to store the full blockchain for those running full nodes.

Not even that. With TX malleability, extra transactions are broadcast around the network, but only 1 is actually stored in the blockchain. He didn't add a single byte to the blockchain that wasn't already going to be there.

It's a "commodity", at least per the IRS and CFTC. Not that it matters for this instance...CNBC [cnbc.com] talks about the recent rule changes. I'm wondering if his attack could be considered something serious now, at least legally. If it can be proven he caused real monetary damages...

Of course he's Russian, so it doesn't really matter. At least it doesn't matter until he manages to screw up some buddy's of Putin, and then "legal repercussions" will be the least of his worries.

Bitcoin is designed to make it very difficult to successfully get fake transactions into the accepted blockchain except on a very short and soon corrected basis - even if you had huge amounts of hashing power which this individual did not. An entire week of lame attempts? Boring.

Bitcoin is designed to make it very difficult to successfully get fake transactions into the accepted blockchain except on a very short and soon corrected basis - even if you had huge amounts of hashing power which this individual did not. An entire week of lame attempts? Boring.

Which is exycatly why bitcoin, the piece of software and its protocol, together with the underlying blockchain technology, are very useful *as of today*, despite the fact that BTC currency seems to have a complete random value.